You See Colours

From the beautiful, upbeat and yet mellow first track "You & Me" this band never disappoints - how do they manage to make such unique music (which sounds like no-one else), and yet keep it so commercial?!

Highlights are "Valentine", "You & Me" and "Waste of Space" but the album as a whole is consistently listenable...for a relatively 'new' band who are still pretty young, they have the world at their feet now their first two albums are available for the world to hear.

The only question is - how do they keep up with the impossibly high quality standards they've set themselves to date?!!! I've no doubt that somehow they'll manage it ;-)

Buy with complete confidence and enjoy...

Following the one-off single 'Lost in a Melody', a more electronic direction has been pursued - primary single 'Valentine' showcases this approach, feeling quite Moroder/New Order (& reminding me of the early work of Associates and lost bands AR Kane & No Man). Greg Gilbert's vocals are certainly becoming stronger, reminding me of future cult god Billy Mackenzie and the songwriting partnership of the Gilbert brothers has developed - blending the ethereal and the electronic.

'This Town's Religion' is slightly harder and isn't that far from The Cure musically (certainly a lot more exciting than the anodyne Placebo)- while 'Disintegration'-style keyboards add to 'Winter's Memory of Summer', which would make a fantastic single and would fit in wonderfully on Geneva's classic debut LP 'Further' (I also thought of the Sundays debut, which means this isn't that far from the likes of The Like...). 'Too Much In Your Life' almost has a glam-beat like Magazine's 'The Light Pours Out of Me' (re-record/remix for a single...) before drifting off into the dream rock stratosphere - which makes me realise that Delays aren't that far from exponents of the second wave of Shoegazing: Jeniferever, Engineers, Sigur Ros etc. Though they have tunes and like pop too - seeming to have tapped into the parts of the 80s that people forget about on list-programmes and related post-millennial lazy TV...

'Hideaway' (...another classic single?...)has another drumbeat that recalls glam, fitting in alongside Belle & Sebastian's 'White Collar Boy', while 'Lillian' offers up territory not that far from Depeche Mode or Goldfrapp - hopefully directions the band will pursue other than the Byrds-LAs-jingly jangle angle.

'You See Colours' is a fine follow-up to Delays' fine debut - hopefully the third album will be the real masterpiece they were building to all along. A record and a band that don't really deserve the hard time they get - I always think folks who don't like the high vocals seem a bit insecure in the same way that Antony & the Johnstons seem to irk some. 'You See Colours' will start to sound even better now that spring is here, and like Delays' earlier work, these pop-songs sound like falling in love, or being far away from home. & look, a band who aren't a tribute act to Blur circa 1994 (Kaiser Chiefs), which has to be a great thing?